GreatWyrmGab

I am privileged to be white and well-off enough to attend and complete college (though not without my share of financial troubles and walking away with a good bit of debt), so I am part of the minority of trans women with a degree. I'd love to use that for something, I'm not sure what yet though. Ask me questions if you want and I can give you my understanding of things synthesizing my lived experience, community wisdom, and academic background, or I can point you to readings that I found valuable.

I'm currently working a manual labor job, idek what I'm gonna do with my degree, but if I had stuck with computer science I suppose I would have been stuck between near impossible odds of getting one of the dwindling number of non military-contractor programming jobs, or being part of the military industrial complex.

“Historically, trans men have made greater contribution to feminism than trans women.“

‘Historically a group that has been systematically excluded from feminist movements has had its contributions to feminism ignored. This is trans women’s fault actually.’

If it looks like a hummingbird, and flies like a hummingbird, it might just be a hummingbird hawk-moth! Like their namesake, hummingbird hawk moths can beat their wings incredibly fast- up to 90 times per second! This allows it to hover and perform tight aerial manuvers. In addition, they have a very long proboscis, which allows it to sip nectar from deep-welled flowers that other insects can't access.

I'm making this post on the behalf of Hamza and Sami Al-Khalili, who are currently trying to raise money to help their large family in Gaza.

Does that make sense? People view fandom itself as diverse, queer, progressive, radical, woman dominated, etc so anything they do within it gets a pass, especially when it's backed up by fans with the same biases as them

I don't think fandom as a whole is worse than mainstream culture but I don't think it's better either. (Although ofc individual spaces can turn insular and rancid.) A lot of spaces formed around popular media just attract people who want their views validated with a progressive aesthetic but when someone pushes back on a micro aggression it becomes very clear that it's only an *aesthetic* and they're there to have fun and not be challenged

The infuriating part is when people want to have both at once: to write whatever they want because it's their silly lil guy hobby and not be criticised or made to self reflect at all (which is hard because they take discussion of wider fandom trends as a personal attack); but also for their fanworks to be treated not only as serious art but also as serious activism. You can have one or the other but you can't have both. And it results in unexamined biases being normalised and spread further because fandom's progressive reputation gives them undeserved legitimacy. (Especially given the tendency of some fans to claim that published books are all either booktok hetslop or written by dead white racists and AO3 is the only place they can read stories by and about queer people/women/people of colour. Which actively erases the contributions of many many published authors from marginalised groups but okay 😤)